AL GHASSANIYEH, Syria — Under a golden autumn sun, Abdallah Ibrahim harvests fistfuls of hard, green olives with evident delight.
"We were denied this pleasure for the last 14 years," he sighs.
Barrel bombs and constant shelling caused his family and most of the residents of his village, Al Ghassaniyeh, to flee during the second year of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. Some stayed, even as Sunni Islamist rebel groups moved in — but they too left after the priest in this historically Christian village was killed.
Ibrahim is one of an estimated 7.4 million Syrians displaced within the country during the war. About 6 million fled abroad as refugees. But after the old regime was ousted last December, Ibrahim and other Syrians started trickling back to their family houses.
Some of them were in for a surprise. They found strangers living in their homes. Some were other displaced Syrians. Many were rebel fighters from other countries.
"If people want to go back to their houses, they cannot live there. Their houses are taken over by somebody else," says Ibrahim, 65. "We cannot live side by side with them."
Now, nearly a year after the end of war, sorting out what belongs to whom after the chaos of war remains a pressing issue. Officials from the new state have called on Syrian refugees abroad to come back to the country.
But, they also need internally displaced Syrians to return to their original homes and clear up questions of property ownership — and they need to reassure displaced members of Syrian minority groups, like Christians such as Ibrahim, as well as Shiite Muslims, that they, too, can get their homes back.
Abandoned in the chaos of war
Last December, elated by the end of war, Ibrahim drove from Aleppo to his family's ancestral village in northern Syria, where he had once been mayor, to check on the family home. He feared it had been destroyed by Russian shelling or rebel artillery.
To his relief, the stone and concrete house he'd inherited from his parents was standing. But he was not able to enter.
He found foreign fighters living in the house. Someone had also ripped out most of his fruit trees – he never figured out who — and the harvests from his large olive groves, at the foot of the village, had been taken over by foreign fighters as well.
There were women living in his home, too. He couldn't tell who they were because he wasn't allowed to speak to them. He says they wore full black niqabs, leaving only their eyes uncovered. "The male fighters largely did not speak Arabic, so I could not communicate with them," he says.
His story is common across Syria. As rebel and former regime forces bisected regions and cities, people left their homes. In their absence, rebel Syrian fighters — as well as foreign Islamist fighters from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Morocco and other countries, among them thousands of ethnic Uyghur fighters fleeing China — moved into his and his neighbors' houses. They say they had permission to do so.
"The [Syrian] commanders told us, look, you guys need houses, and your guys helped a lot with the liberation of this area, so you can go into the houses where the owners have left and houses are empty houses," recalls the Uyghur force's deputy commander, a man who goes only by his first name, Jalaldeen.
Early this year, all of Al Ghassaniyeh's some 4,000 residents officially applied to Syria's new housing authority to come back. Uyghur officers then spent months finding new housing for hundreds of Uyghur families who had settled in the abandoned Syrian homes — an undertaking they found challenging as rental prices have increased since the war's end.
The Uyghurs say they respect the original inhabitants' claims. "This is not our country. It has many religious groups and ethnic groups already living here, and all of us are equal. If the owners [of this house] come back, then I will leave," said Bilal, a Uyghur fighter who lives in a formerly Shiite village. He wanted to be identified only by his first name to protect his family members in China, where Uyghurs are subject to persecution.
Still, some Syrians, especially those in minority groups like Christians and Shiites, remain fearful of the foreign fighters who have settled across northern Syria and seem to have no intention of leaving in the imminent future.
"Our neighbors have drunk the milk of this Salafi ideology, and it has become part of their worldview. They do not want us there," says Denise Khoury, 75, referring to a fundamentalist strain of Islam. She says she checked up on her mother's house in the northern city of Jisr al-Shughur and found foreign fighters living inside.
Figuring out what belongs to whom
Even before the Syrian war ended, some rebel groups recognized the gravity of returning land and houses.
In 2022, a Christian parish met with then-Syrian militia leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who would become the country's president in 2024 and this month was the first Syrian leader to visit the White House.
"He promised that our rights would be restored, recognizing that us 'Nazarenes' were part of this country and entitled to recover what had been taken during the chaos, which no one can deny," says Louay Bisharat, 43, using a term referring to Christians that's used colloquially by some fundamentalist Muslims. Bisharat is a priest who helped lead the meetings.
In 2024, a few months before rebel groups led by Sharaa ousted the Assad regime, Bisharat says he met with Asaad al-Shaibani, now Syria's foreign minister, and soon after was able to recover some churches and lands that had been occupied by rebel fighters.
Zikwan Hajji Hamud, 32, a real estate agent in Jisr al-Shughur, says another layer of difficulty in sorting out ownership was people selling property on behalf of other Syrians who had left the country, or even selling property they did not outright own. "During the revolution, there was a lot of playing about with property deeds," he says.
In some cases, fighters and their families also built new structures on land they occupied, and the new state had no mechanism to compensate them for any new structures.
Fadi Azar, a Roman Catholic priest who has been helping represent Christian communities in Syria get their land back, says at first the foreign fighters asked for $50 a dunam, about a quarter acre, an offer residents refused.
Eventually, everyone agreed on a deadline of October, after the autumn olive harvest. "They reached an agreement that two-thirds of the harvest will be for them and one third for the owner, the Christian who owns the land," Azar says.
In November, Ibrahim, the former Al Ghassaniyeh village mayor, reached out to NPR with good news: all the land and houses had been returned to their original owners. Al Ghassaniyeh held mass celebrations with dancing and drummers to commemorate the occasion. Some village buildings had been blasted open during the war, others marred by graffiti left by fighting groups passing through. But now their owners can begin to rebuild.
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